A Return to Modesty:Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provokemounting impatience.Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got herein the first place.Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown.Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition ofthe family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers;policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded,leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical.She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family.She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion.It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to havebeenreplaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation.Ifthe account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage.Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be.She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposalsand concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution.She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films.Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments andtheir contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed.However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners.Acertain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively.For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them.It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad moralsseem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population.However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world neednot for the moment trouble us.What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour.Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness ofhappenings and occasions.As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death.Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however,is that there is no going back.Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful.Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that woulduphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue ofchanges that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course.Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous;a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow;civilization itself will be endangered.Now that the Cold War is overand communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit.We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder.A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy.We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition.Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage.But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity.What about making divorceextremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew,rather than ‘till death do us part’?This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage.Andpeople might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives.But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking?If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together withthe imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

* Salisbury Review, London, Spring 2000

HUMPTY DUMPTY'S PROBLEM*

By Patricia Lança

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.All the King’s horses and all the King’s menCouldn’t put Humpty together again.

A Return to Modesty:Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provokemounting impatience.Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got herein the first place.Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown.Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition ofthe family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers;policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded,leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical.She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family.She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion.It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to havebeenreplaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation.Ifthe account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage.Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be.She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposalsand concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution.She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films.Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments andtheir contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed.However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners.Acertain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively.For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them.It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad moralsseem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population.However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world neednot for the moment trouble us.What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour.Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness ofhappenings and occasions.As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death.Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however,is that there is no going back.Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful.Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that woulduphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue ofchanges that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course.Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous;a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow;civilization itself will be endangered.Now that the Cold War is overand communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit.We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder.A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy.We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition.Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage.But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity.What about making divorceextremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew,rather than ‘till death do us part’?This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage.Andpeople might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives.But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking?If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together withthe imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

* Salisbury Review, London, Spring 2000

HUMPTY DUMPTY'S PROBLEM*

By Patricia Lança

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.All the King’s horses and all the King’s menCouldn’t put Humpty together again.

A Return to Modesty:Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit, The Free Press, New York, 1999.

BOOKS DESCRIBING the negative consequences of the sexual revolution provide dismal reading and provokemounting impatience.Not simply because of the less than edifying facts they recount but because they rarely get to the heart of the matter: they discuss neither causes nor cures other than superficially. After all, if we are to find our way out of the present deplorable mess (and both these books show that it is indeed deplorable), we need to know how we got herein the first place.Melanie Phillips, with the same care with which she built up her case against the education establishment in All Must Have Prizes, provides a catalogue of factors leading to family breakdown.Promotion of single motherhood and a new definition ofthe family unit as consisting of mother and offspring; the exclusion of fathers;policies and propaganda to the effect that male and female are identical; denigration of traditional male (and female) virtues such as responsibility, protectiveness, courage and loyalty; divorce rates of epidemic proportions.

Melanie Phillips documents all of these and adds to them by discussing what she calls the ‘growing crisis among men’, whose sense of identity has been eroded,leading to ‘despair, irresponsibility and violence’.

Wendy Shalit is more anecdotal, impressionistic and to some extent autobiographical.She describes nostalgically the orthodox Jewish approach to conjugal modesty as she learned it from members of her own family.She is damning in her denunciation of a society where: Nowadays, a girl can’t get aspirin from her school nurse without parental permission, but in many states, she can get on the Pill or have an abortion.It is her decision alone.

Shalit speaks for her own generation, the offspring of the baby-boomers, declaring that ‘…sometimes we would prefer not to have learned about AIDS in kindergarten.’She is describing contemporary US society and the truly staggering (by European standards) promiscuity of college students, for whom old-fashioned dating seems to havebeenreplaced by indiscriminate and instant copulation.Ifthe account she gives is not exaggerated one wonders when these young people find time or energy to study.

Melanie Phillips is mainly concerned with British society and especially with the misconceived legislation which has now got to the point of creating fiscal disincentives to marriage.Her book is so packed with facts and figures that it is a pity the lack of an index makes it less useful than it should be.She ends her indictment with a concluding chapter proposing ‘ A Policy for all the Family’.

Consequences of Gender feminist ideology

Shalit, whose book is, by contrast, almost excessively documented and indexed, makes various constructive proposalsand concludes by asking for a new sexual revolution.She thinks that many of her contemporaries are unhappy with the present state of affairs and that this accounts for the popularity of period romance on TV and in films.Phillips depicts British ruling circles as being concerned about the breakdown of the family as a cause of disorder and the development of the ‘lad culture’ but she sees government as condemned to adoption of incoherent and counterproductive policies because of the proliferation within its ranks of gender feminists.

There can be little doubt that each of these writers has valid arguments andtheir contributions to an ever-growing critical bibliography in this area are to be welcomed.However, neither nostalgia for a largely mythical past nor denunciation of the lunacies of the gender feminists will do much to change things. After all, the disappearance of modesty, reticence and ordinary decency in relations between the sexes is part of a general deterioration in manners.Acertain modicum of formality, of ritual and of hierarchy is essential for the preservation of social order, as chimps and other social animals know instinctively.For individuals to flourish within a collective there must be a recognized and respected space allowed to them.It is surely not coincidental that bad manners and bad moralsseem to go hand in hand with the growth of over-familiarity, contempt for ritual and disregard for promises given.

The three essential facts of human life, birth, marriage and death, have all been vitally affected by the advance of technology and the increasing modernization of society. Birth is regulated by contraception and abortion instead of the traditional means of abstinence. Death has been almost eliminated from child-birth for both mother and child. Infant mortality is now rare and life expectancy far exceeds the biblical span. Death itself has been evicted from the home and takes place in the near-secrecy of the hospital ward and in the presemce pf professional 'careers' rather than the family.

All this, of course, is very ‘eurocentric’. We only have to watch the news on TV on any night of the week to see that death in every shape and form is the everyday experience of half the world’s population.However, it is the world of Anglo-American and European civilization we are concerned with, and whether modernization will bring the same ills as ours to the ‘developing’ world neednot for the moment trouble us.What is our concern is that the banishment of death from the home and the proliferation of material comfort have brought about momentous changes in outlook and behaviour.Among them are the cult of equality and informality and increasing reluctance to discuss serious matters seriously, and so increasing impatience with ritual. Ritual is the way all societies attempt to inculcate in their members an awareness of the seriousness ofhappenings and occasions.As Dr Johnson pointed out with regard to the prospect of hanging, it concentrates the mind wonderfully to be faced with death.Ritual has the same function. In a society in which death is invisible and ritual trivialized, we can scarcely expect seriousness to be widespread.

The trouble, however,is that there is no going back.Nostalgia may be a pleasant self-indulgence but it is scarcely useful.Nobody wants to return to the world of suffering before the alleviations provided by modern medicine and modern comforts. Even the sincere practising Catholic is unlikely to follow the Pope’s ukases on birth control. No politician would get very far if he proposed returning to legislation that woulduphold the indissolubility of marriage. Nor would most people relish going back to the extremes of social formality, scarcely practical anyway in industrial society. And so we might continue with the long catalogue ofchanges that have brought us to the present pass.

So what is to be done?

The question must be put seriously for if nothing is done decadence will certainly have its course.Our cities will become increasingly disordered and dangerous;a helot class of uneducable and unemployable will grow;civilization itself will be endangered.Now that the Cold War is overand communism conspiracies can no longer be blamed we need to ask ourselves what interests in our own societies stand to benefit.We really do need to identify and name those capitalist interests benefited by disorder.A market economy must not be confused with a black market economy.We also need to take a long, hard look at old customs and institutions and see whether it isn’t reform they need rather than abolition.Melanie Phillips thinks that many British politicians would like to abolish marriage.But there is something else you could do to restore its dignity.What about making divorceextremely difficult for couples with children and easier still for everyone else? Or even irrevocable 20-year marriage contracts, with an option to renew,rather than ‘till death do us part’?This would end once and for all the present appalling get-rich-quick divorce scams some women manage.Andpeople might find sacrificing themselves for the sake of the children a reasonable proposition if there were light at the end of the tunnel.

Such proposals as this may shock good conservatives.But isn’t the present state of affairs even more shocking?If the nuclear family of man, wife and children is to be saved and the nanny-State defeated, there need to be innovation together withthe imagination to conceive it and the will to implement it.

Arquivo do blog

AIMS AND PURPOSES

Patrícia Lança has other blogs, Portolani and Portolani Special,which publish material on a variety of subjects. This blog, howeverwill be devoted exclusively to themes related to Gender Politics and the Culture Wars. Serious comments are welcome but will be moderated in order to avoid the kind of nonsense and vulgarity, which inevitably arise when these subjects are mentioned.

STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES

The author, a feminist of the old school, subscribes to the principles of classical liberalism and does not favour criminalization or prohibition of any behaviour that does not harm other people. Liberals believe that individuals are free to pursue their own life-styles, provided they do not interfere with those of others. Liberals can never condone attempts to silence the free expression of opinion in appropriate forums on any grounds whatsoever. This freedom does not, of course, apply to private spaces, which is why comments here will be moderated. Those who feel unfairly restricted possess the freedom to institute their own blogs or websites where they can freely give reign to whatever Google or the relevant server does not prohibit.

Portolani Redux aims to restore some rationality and balance to the discussion of subjects which, despite the hilarity they arouse in the frivolous, have become increasingly important in the last two or three decades. Restoring rationality in this area involves exposing and criticizing attempts at censorship in the name of spurious claims to protect minorities. In a free society nobody can be above criticism or demand undue privilege and immunity. Good manners cannot be legislated into existence and can only become generalized by practice and example.

Where there is discrimination against individuals to prevent them from exercising their legimate rights, this should be denounced. What should also be discussed is what these rights are and whether they need to be extended.

Accordingly this space will discuss such controversial questions as legislation about and provision for abortion, adoption rights, marriage entitlement, family breakdown and the European demographic crisis.

INVITATION

Serious contributions to this discussion, beyond the normal size of a comment, are welcome. They may be sent to the author by e-mail to be considered for publication as normal posts subject to comment. Limit to number of words: 750 words. Language: English, Portuguese, Spanish or French. Relevant links and references to books and publications are also welcome.E-mail: patamar@lanca.org

LINK LIST

OTHER SITES

Visit other Portolani sites:Portolani, Portolani Special and Portolani Books (still under construction). The owner of these sites also writes, together with a distinguished team of bloggers, for O Insurgente.